g--nothing----He's bursting with
health."

"What did you mean, then?"

"I meant--supposing he were ill----"

"You meant to frighten me?"

She sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. He knelt beside her
and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror.
At his touch she turned to him and kissed him.

"Hugh, dear," she said, "don't frighten me again. It's not necessary."

All that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and
with the house. It was as if she were trying, passionately, to make up
for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness.

Then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable
fatigue and depression. Brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to
himself. He was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing.

One Saturday evening Jinny came to him in his study. She carried the
dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books.

"Is it those horrible accounts?" he said.

She was so sick, so white and harassed, so piteously humble, that he
knew. She had got them all wrong again.

"I did _try_ to keep them," she said.

"Don't try. Leave the damned things alone."

"I _have_ left them," she wailed. "And look at them."

He looked. A child, he thought, could have kept them straight. They were
absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile,
elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion,
of intricate complexity.

That was bad enough. But it was nothing to the disorder of what Jinny
called her own little affairs. There seemed at first to be no relation
between Jinny's proved takings and the sums that Jinny was aware of as
having passed into her hands. And then Brodrick found the cheques at the
back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten,
Brodrick said, as if they had never been.

"I'm dreadful," said Jinny.

"You are. What on earth did you do before you married me?"

"George Tanqueray helped me."

He frowned.

"Well, you can leave it to me now," he said.

"It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote."

That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.

"If," said she, "we only had a housekeeper."

"A housekeeper?"

"It's a housekeeper you want."

She put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive
caress.

"You really ought," she said, "to have married Gertrude."

"You've told me that several times alr